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Parsimony	By : Lomonaaeren Category: Harry Potter > Slash - Male/Male > Harry/Draco Views: 14122 -:- Recommendations : 1 -:- Currently Reading : 2
Disclaimer: I do not own Harry Potter. I am making no money from this fanfic.

Chapter List
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Chapter Twenty-Nine—Through the Walls of Stone

            “And now, boys…”

            Professor Flitwick was turning towards Harry and Draco with a look of expectation that was, frankly, terrifying. But they had been working on Triad Charms—and more often now that Draco’s friends were free of the corrupted Memory Charm and they had to wait for Snape to brew the potion—so Harry nodded and stood up, glancing over at Draco. He was already on his feet, his lips slightly parted as though he was feeling his way through the words of the incantation they would use in his head.

            “But professor,” Zabini said, so innocently that most people listening to him might have forgotten he was a Slytherin, “Potter and Malfoy are pretty close, don’t you think? That might make the Triad Charm too easy for them. It’s not a real test.”

            Draco stiffened and shot Zabini a glare that made Harry want to cheer. Draco had gone from cringing in front of Zabini’s insults to fighting back against some of them to openly resenting them. He still wanted Zabini back as a friend, Harry had no doubt, but if Zabini continued attacking him over completely unrelated things, then that would lessen Draco’s desperation.

            And that was all to the good, in Harry’s opinion. He couldn’t see Draco and Zabini forming a strong friendship again if it only happened because of guilt and outrage.

            “Well, Mr. Zabini, I should hope they would know each other well after the weeks of practice that they’ve put in,” Flitwick said, pushing his glasses up his nose and giving Zabini his version of a severe glare. “Triad Charms are cast together for this reason.” He turned and gave Draco an encouraging nod. Harry wondered if Flitwick was really sensitive to the fact that Draco needed it or just assumed Harry had all the confidence he would ever require after being at war for the last year. “When you’re ready, gentlemen.”

            Harry took a step behind Draco. Draco half-turned his head to regard him and mouthed the words, As we decided?

            Harry muffled a snort at the idea that he would change his mind when they were on the verge of casting as a pair for the first big test. He just nodded and raised his wand. Draco faced the front of the classroom and raised his at the same time.

            As Draco spoke the incantation they had decided on, Harry murmured the spell that would transfer his power to Draco, and felt the sensation running through him, sweet and strong and heady, like some of the Firewhisky he’d helped George drink after Fred’s funeral.

            “Olim videri!”

            The air around them seemed to grow thick, and Harry wanted to cough. But that would probably ruin Draco’s nervous concentration, so he held the sound in and instead watched as the colors gushed and danced, wavered back and forth like fire against the wall and then became so solid and real that Harry nearly reached out to feel them.

            He and Draco had chosen an illusion spell for this practical exam, which required concentration and demonstration of a powerful and finicky charm. But it was a special illusion spell, modified with a twist from some of the ones that Mind-Healers used in treating patients with blocked memories. Harry gave a half-smile. Their Memory Charm research had succeeded in helping them with their schoolwork after all.

            The colors collided and locked together, and Harry had the sensation, again, of choking on incense, and then it was gone and they were staring at what looked like a tapestry. On one side, it shone with the colors of green and brown and rusty yellow. It was the Forbidden Forest, the way it had looked on the night when Harry walked through it to confront Voldemort.

            On the other side—

            Harry couldn’t help but reach forwards and grip Draco’s shoulder when he saw it, even knowing it might distract him. Draco had said very little of which memory he intended to handle, and Harry hadn’t pressed him on that, either. It had seemed best to let him choose when he’d had so little to choose in the past few years.

            But it was a memory of Draco standing in front of his mad, dead aunt, with Bellatrix staring him in the eyes and whispering, “You have to hold your Occlumency shields, baby. You have to hold them. Or—” She bent down in front of Draco, so fast it was terrifying, smiling at him from a few inches away with bright and bloody teeth. “Or I’ll rip them away.” Then she lifted her head and changed her smile, looking now as though she was petting a beloved dog. “You see? Incentive!”

            Draco swallowed and looked at the floor, nodding. He was standing somewhere in Malfoy Manor, Harry thought, from the color of the walls, but he had no idea where. He couldn’t help the shudder that rippled up and down his spine, and he wanted to clench his fists. Draco had suffered, and had chosen to show his suffering to the class.

            Of course, from the stiff way that Draco held his neck to prevent himself from turning his head if nothing else, Harry knew who his real targets in the classroom were. He didn’t know if the Slytherins would permit themselves to understand the message. But that wasn’t his concern. He massaged Draco’s shoulders and was silent.

            “Showing off your pasts!” Flitwick said, his voice shattering what had come to seem almost like a private moment to Harry. He clapped his hands and bustled forwards, standing to one side of the seeming tapestry so that he could look at the memories. “And with such clarity, too.” He glanced at Draco, compassion in the lines of his face. Harry wondered if it would help Draco to talk to him.

            Then he nodded to Harry. “And yours, Mr. Potter. I’m afraid that I don’t, er, recognize it as immediately as I do Mr. Malfoy’s…”

            “On my way into the Forest on the evening of the battle,” Harry said, and smiled at him. “But I thought showing Voldemort might panic some people, so I didn’t.”

            Flitwick blinked, and then said, “Ah, yes. A good choice, Mr. Potter.” He looked again at the trees, as though he didn’t know what might appear next, and then clapped his hands and smiled at them. “Full marks, boys. Really most impressive.”

            Harry squeezed Draco’s shoulder down low on the blade, where no one much would see him do it, and then turned back to his seat. Draco followed him with his head lowered. Harry wondered if he was regretting showing that memory to everyone instead of the couple of people it was really directed to, and tried to whisper to him when they sat back down, but Draco turned his head and focused on the Slytherins.

            Harry did, too, under the disguise of bending down so that he could pick up the quill he’d dropped. He saw Zabini sitting with his head turned away, rejection in every line of his body, and Greengrass fixated on her own quill, which she was twiddling between her fingers. They were sitting in a way that made it hard for Harry to get a glimpse of the expressions the others wore.

            Except Goyle. He was utterly transfixed, and he was staring at Draco like he’d never seen him before. Then he saw Harry looking and jerked his eyes away. His hand closed into a fist for a moment, and he sighed.

            Draco had seen it, too. Harry heard him echo the sigh, and his hand relaxed on top of the table. Harry stroked it, and then began to separate the fingers, patiently, until Draco noticed and took his hand away again.

            As Flitwick called on the next group ready to perform the Triad Charm, Harry relaxed back in his seat. There seemed to be some hope of Draco getting his friends back after all. And frankly, if they didn’t all come back, Harry thought Zabini, at least, was no great loss.

            But that was the sort of thing that his summer had taught him not to say.

*

            “I think that you could go and rouse Draco out of sleep once in a while,” Harry hissed at Snape’s owl, as it settled on his headboard and stared at him. “I was just getting used to sleeping at night again.”

            The owl gave him a long, slow stare that was even better than McGonagall’s at making him feel stupid, and Harry’s face burned when he remembered that Draco had been sleeping in the Room of Requirement for a few weeks now. There were no windows there for the owl to get in, and Draco might have forgotten to wish for a room where owls could find him. Probably he wouldn’t want to, in fact, in case his former friends took the opportunity to send him nasty tricks and hexes that way.

            Harry sat up and shoved his glasses on, wishing that he could stop being so bloody reasonable all the time. It wasn’t weird that Draco found him hard to deal with.

            But this summer had taught him to see too much, and he had chosen to willingly help Draco and Snape. It wasn’t as though someone had held a wand to his head.

            The note was briefer than the last one, but still in Snape’s handwriting that Harry thought he would always associate with sharp remarks over his lack of Potions knowledge.

            Come and meet me. I am near the place where you helped me rise.

            Your contact.

            Harry sighed and laid the letter down on the bed, glaring at the owl. “Like I said,” he muttered, “why am I the one who always needs to go out to the Shrieking Shack at night? It could be Draco once in a while. He wants this potion more than I do, anyway. I only wanted it brewed because it might help him.”

            The owl, who had been preening the feathers in the middle of its back, paused and gave him a look that said, as far as it was concerned, Harry was the idiot for volunteering his favor to Snape like that in the first place. Then it went back to preening.

            “Of course you would think that,” Harry muttered, climbing out of bed and reaching for his Invisibility Cloak. “You’re a Slytherin owl.”

            The owl fluffed up its feathers and turned around to excrete a pellet on his sheets. Harry did take some pleasure in waving his wand and Vanishing that before he picked up his Cloak and sneaked out of his bedroom.

            He had to freeze several times when going along the corridors because of patrolling professors, and once Klein went past and glanced around as though smelling him, which made Harry press against the wall with his heart beating frantically. She would be much harder than the others if she caught him out without his Tracking Charm, breaking his promise to the Aurors.

            But in the end she was gone, too, and Harry stepped out onto the dim grass beneath the dim moonlight. He would need to visit the wolfwere tonight, he thought. Another person he had decided to help, and he was paying the price for it in obligations and broken sleep.

            No, that’s wrong, he decided as he trotted towards the Whomping Willow, and conjured a ball of twisted twigs and grass to throw at the knot on its trunk. It’s not as though anyone forced me to help him, either.

            But…

            It was possible that he didn’t need to go around picking up new people to help. Perhaps he could let Draco do some things on his own. And after this potion, he and Snape would be even and shouldn’t need each other anymore, either.

            “Potter.”

            Harry jerked to a stop and wondered for a moment how Snape had seen him, and why he was outside the Shrieking Shack instead of inside it. Then, as the dark shape split away from the trees, Harry remembered that the note had said only that he would be near the place where Harry had helped him rise, and shook his head.

            And if he had come back from death with a few new abilities, why shouldn’t seeing through Invisibility Cloaks be one of them?

            “Sir,” Harry said, pulling the Cloak off over his head. “You have the potion brewed?”

            “All except one last step,” Snape said, and then stood there staring at him. The hard breeze tugged at his hair, and a few drops of rain fell on his head. Harry grimaced and cast an Impervious Charm to fend it off. There were people—like Hermione, he knew—who would say that was an irresponsible use of magic, but he didn’t want to go back to his bed leaving little puddles of water in the corridors, either.

            “Well, what’s the last step?” Harry prompted at last, when he had decided that Snape wasn’t going to say anything on his own, God knew why. “Something you need my help with? I can break into Slughorn’s stores, if you want. It’s long enough now since someone did that he’s stopped guarding them quite so hard.” And he knew he could take the simple wards around the supply cupboard apart even if Slughorn was still paranoid, but he thought Snape would say it was bragging if he said that.

            “I came to ask,” Snape said, his voice low, “if you are sure that you want to use the favor I owe you on this potion.”

            “Yes, and yes, and yes,” Harry said promptly. “I don’t need to think about it. I can’t think of any other potion that I’m likely to need, and I know that this would make a lot of difference to Draco, if only to settle what he dreads.”

            Snape half-shook his head. “You do not know what potions you might need in the future.”

            “But I don’t know that you’ll always be in a position to help me, either,” Harry pointed out. “Maybe you would leave Britain, or not have the time to drop all your commissions and brew me a potion immediately when I needed it. It’s better for me to use what’s in front of me and find someone else to help me later, not hold back on this because, well, I might need a Potions master like you in the future.”

            Snape was still for so long that Harry started to think he would refuse simply to be a jerk and march off into the distance. Then he said, “I had not realized that you were so…committed to Mr. Malfoy.”

            “More committed to him than I think he is to me,” Harry said, and gave Snape an embarrassed smile. “And this probably isn’t the kind of thing you want to hear about, sorry. But it’s true. I like him enough, I value him enough, that I want to encourage him, and it would mean a lot to him—it would calm him down and let him focus on other things—if he could know that his father is still in prison. Or out of it.”

            Snape continued to watch him. Harry held his eyes, and wondered what was going through Snape’s head. Was he still acting as the Head of Slytherin in some ways, and questioning in his own mind whether Harry was worthy enough to date a member of his House? Or did he have more affection for Draco than he pretended to, and he wanted to make sure that Harry was really that devoted?

            “Lily’s child,” Snape murmured at last.

            Harry nearly looked over his shoulder to see if Snape was talking about someone else, but his knowledge of Snape’s memories and how he had spoken in the past prevented him from doing that. Snape would say the most scathing things. “Yeah?” he asked quietly.

            “You are more your mother’s son than I knew,” Snape said. “I had suspected it when you were willing to sacrifice your life to save the world, but even that could have been Dumbledore’s training, his expectations. But you helped me return to life, and you are doing all this for Draco, sacrificing something that could be valuable, when he can do nothing so worthy in return.”

            Harry refrained from rolling his eyes, but it was fairly hard. “Why talk like that?” he asked. “Draco is a human being, just like me. He made a stupid mistake, sure, but at least he’s managed to restore his friends’ memories now and end the danger that they’ll go insane. The rest of the atonement he can make has to be left up to time. People keep talking—you and the other Slytherins, and even McGonagall sometimes—like he’s so far beneath me that I shouldn’t even look at him. It’s stupid.”

            Snape spent a little more time watching him. Then he reached down to his side, where a fat leather bag hung. Harry stiffened and gripped his wand before he could stop himself, but Snape only took out something and held it out to him. Harry still carefully watched his hands as he moved towards him. Long experience during the war had made him aware of how fast some wizards could move their arms when they wanted to.

            What Snape gave him was a single, smooth glass vial, with a potion inside that shone like moonlight. Harry stared at it, and then up at Snape. “This is the potion that will let us see through the walls of Azkaban,” he said.

            Snape inclined his head. “You will drink half and Draco will drink half if you wish to share the vision,” he said. “And you should, as Draco’s perceptions and hopes might make him mistake what it shows him.”

            Harry shook his head, at a loss. “You had this, and you held it back? You asked me all those questions even though you already had the potion brewed? Why? What would you have done if I said that I wanted the favor for myself after all?”

            “Taken the potion away and destroyed it,” Snape said calmly. “Then owled the instructions for making it to Draco anonymously.”

            Harry just shook his head again, and went on staring until Snape gave a long sigh that seemed to have all the weariness of the world in it. “Harry,” he said. “I called on you for help because I thought that your sense of honor and goodness—” he grimaced as if he was allergic to the word “—would compel you to help me, and other considerations could wait. I did not expect you to extend the consideration you showed me to Draco, and I did not expect you be as much help as you were. I thought you would gather ingredients for me only. In the end, you did more than that, and that means a debt is owed. More than the debts that connected us during the war, and which you fulfilled by sacrificing your life and which I fulfilled by nearly dying. But since then, there are new ones between us. No one has done for me what you did, do you understand? Helping me simply because they believed they should. No one but Lily.”

            Harry didn’t look away from Snape’s eyes. He had the sensation that if he did, that would break the spell that lingered between them, and a moment like this would never come again. “So you kept testing me to see if I would turn out to be evil and Gryffindor after all,” he murmured.

            Snape grimaced and half-bowed his head. “Indeed. I thought there had to be a catch to such selfless generosity, even if you yourself did not see it at first. I discovered quickly that that was—not the case. You were capable of forgiving former enemies.”

            Harry shrugged. “I—I’m not as selfless as you’re making me out to be. I do want Draco to date me, and I did want this potion from you.”

            “But you are not what I thought you were, either.” Snape turned his head to the side, as if he was incapable of meeting Harry’s eyes for the next words he had to speak. “And I was so sure that my assumptions were the right ones, anything that proves them wrong is shattering.”

            Harry thought the most respectful thing he could do was stand there quietly. Snape’s hands twisted together as though he was expecting some interjection, but Harry waited, and finally Snape’s shoulders lowered and he nodded.

            “This is the end of the debts between us,” he said. “I need not provide anything else to you.”

            “I know,” Harry agreed. “I hope that you can go somewhere else and have a good life.” It was a stupid wish, and he knew it from the way that Snape’s lip curled, but it was the best one he could think of on short notice, and at least one that he sincerely meant.

            Snape looked at him for a few minutes more, perhaps giving him one more chance to prove that he was a childish Gryffindor, and then turned and vanished into the Forest. Harry cast a few more Unbreakable Charms on the vial, although he could feel that it had plenty of them already. Still, it would have to ride back to Gryffindor Tower in his pocket, and he didn’t want to take the chance that it would shatter.

            When he turned away, it was to forge into the Forbidden Forest and seek out the wolfwere.

*

            The wolfwere came to him in animal form, springing out from behind the dark trees and landing in front of Harry as he stepped into the clearing with the pool. Harry stood still, not sure that this was the wolfwere and not an ordinary wolf until it transformed. At once he was on hands and knees a few inches away from Harry, golden eyes staring into his soul.

            “You have learned something,” he said.

            Harry nodded. “I have a potion that will let me see the location of one who could have harmed your pups,” he said. “At the moment, we know the face that man is wearing, but we’re not sure if it’s his real face or a false one.”

            The wolfwere scraped his curled fingers against the earth. “You went once to try and strip the false face from him,” he said. “And you did not succeed. When will you find the killer?”

            “When I find him,” Harry said. “And I will, I promise, no matter how long it takes me.”

            The wolfwere sat back on his haunches and stared at Harry some more. Then he said, “The werewolf is dead, and you cannot bring me his body.”

            Harry shook his head. “I tried every way I could think of to ask, but they won’t release a piece to me. And if I went and found it and stole one, the Ministry would immediately know what I’d done. They would prevent me from coming back to help you,” he added, because the wolfwere watched him as though not understanding why that should be a problem. And why should he? It was up to Harry to explain why.

            The wolfwere spent a few more minutes scraping in the dirt and pebbles, then said, “I may have something that will help you. Bide.” And he turned and sprang into the darkness.

            Harry leaned back against a tree and listened to the sounds of the Forest for a moment. He was wondering gloomily if he could ever find a way to help the wolfwere, but then he remembered the vial in his pocket and patted the glass through the cloth of his robes. He had solved one problem, incredible as it seemed. He would hope with this one, too.

            Soft, pattering noises announced the wolfwere’s return. He came around the large tree and leaped across the pool to land at Harry’s feet.

            In his mouth was a severed human hand.

*

            ChaosLady: Thank you!

            SP777: Thanks! And I am sorry for your poor pudding-brain!

            Snape has been out of the Shack for a while, since Chapter 23.

            Makoto_Sagara: Happy belated birthday!

            Ron really does want to help Hermione, but at the same time he understands why she refuses—but at the same time he wants to help. Which leaves him with a lot of feelings.

            Draco is still expecting to wake up and have this turn out to be a dream that was too good to last, frankly. If he wasn’t, if he could trust in its reality, then he might be a little less snappish and cranky.

            polka dot: For Harry, that he’s sincerely sorry makes a big difference.

            unneeded: I think Harry has thought a little bit more than Draco. He was thinking of being a Healer in an earlier chapter.

            Sneakyfox: Thank you!

            Zip: Don’t worry about it; I still understood. Harry might tell Draco that the Hat wanted to put him in Slytherin later; the main problem at the moment is that he’s afraid Draco might not believe him or think Harry is only saying that to make him feel better.
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Parsimony